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Overview

“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.”—Cornel West

“Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks.”—New York Times

Lost Memory of Skin is a provocative novel of spiritual and moral redemption from Russell Banks, the author of Affliction, Rule of the Bone, Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter, and other acclaimed masterworks of contemporary American fiction. Uncompromising and complex, Lost Memory of Skin is the story of The Kid, a young sex offender recently released from prison and forced to live beneath a South Florida causeway. When The Professor, a man of enormous intellect and appetite, takes The Kid under his wing, his own startling past will cause upheavals in both of their worlds. At once lyrical, witty, and disturbing, Banks’s extraordinary novel showcases his abilities as a world-class storyteller as well as his incisive understanding of the dangerous contradictions and hypocrisies of modern American society.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

For his latest novel, the acclaimed author of Cloudsplitter and The Sweet Hereafter again takes inspiration from a sanctuary of sorts. "The Kid," a young sex offender, lives with other registered offenders (including a disgraced state senator) in a makeshift camp beneath a Florida causeway based on a real colony that was shut down in 2010. After a police raid, the Kid meets "the Professor," a pompous, rotund man claiming to be researching homelessness. He wants to study—and cure—the Kid in order to prove his theories about society. But just as the study commences, the Professor, claiming that his life is in danger because of past work as a government spy, turns the tables, paying the Kid to interview him instead. Bloated and remarkably repetitive, this is more a collection of ideas and emblems than a novel. Though the Kid remains mostly opaque, he's a sympathetic character, but the nature of his crime, once revealed, lets Banks off the hook and simplifies rather than complicates matters. Banks continually refers to the Professor's weight and mental superiority, the latter a contrivance allowing for long rhetorical passages into the nature of man, sexual obsession, pornography, truth, and commerce that come as no surprise. Most frustrating is Banks's almost pathological restating of his characters' traits and motives, resulting in a highly frustrating novel in desperate need of an editor. (Sept.)

From his makeshift tent in the shantytown under the causeway, the Kid can see the sun rise over the city of Calusa and feel the Atlantic breeze riffling the royal palm fronds. But the dichotomy between paradise and the squalor of the encampment is not lost on him. The only area within the city limits that is more than 2500 feet from a school, park, or library, the causeway bridge shelters homeless sex offenders on probation with nowhere else to go. Living in anonymity, the damaged group runs the gamut from a politician with a penchant for little girls to this lonely, asocial boy, whose only sexual relationship took place in an Internet chat room. When the Professor arrives to interview the Kid for a sociological study, the Kid wants to trust the man, and we hope he'll be saved through human interaction. But the Professor has his own demons. VERDICT Multiaward winner Banks (Affliction) has written a disturbing contemporary novel that feels biblical in its examination of good and evil, penance and salvation, while issuing a cri de coeur for penal reform. The graphic language may be off-putting for some but necessarily advances the theme of illusion vs. reality in the digital world. [See Prepub Alert, 4/18/11.]—Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL

Kirkus Reviews

Banks (The Reserve,2008, etc.) once again explores the plight of the dispossessed, taking a big risk this time by making his protagonist a convicted sex offender.

He hedges his bets slightly: The Kid is a 22-year-old who got jailed for showing up at a 14-year-old girl's house with condoms, K-Y jelly, porn and beer after some sexy Internet chat. But Banks makes it clear that there are plenty of actual child molesters and "baby bangers" camped out with the Kid under a Florida causeway—because they're prohibited from living 2,500 feet from any place children under 18 congregate, which is pretty much everywhere. It's less clear whether the author agrees with the Professor, a sociologist specializing in the causes of homelessness, that pedophilia is a response to feelings of powerlessness and a disease of the modern media world that sexualizes children in advertising. Ambiguity rules in Banks' knotty narrative of the Kid's odyssey after police break up the encampment under the causeway (it's an election year) and he loses his job as a busboy. Was the Professor really a government informer back in the 1960s? Are his former bosses trying to kill him, as he claims? Maybe, but it's hard to tell. And Banks doesn't make it easy to like the Kid, addicted to porn since he started watching it on the Internet at age 10 to blot out the sounds of his mother having sex with her various boyfriends, so isolated by his own wounds that other people don't seem very real to him. Though there's plenty of plot, including a hurricane and a dead body fished out of a canal, the slow growth of the Kid's self-knowledge and his empathy for others is the real story, offering the only ray of hope in an otherwise bleak consideration of a broken society and the damaged people it breeds.

Intelligent, passionate and powerful, but very stark indeed.

Janet Maslin

…a major new work…destined to be a canonical novel of its time…it delivers another of Mr. Banks's wrenching, panoramic visions of American moral life…This book expresses the conviction that we live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain.The New York Times

Sue Miller

…like so much else Banks has written, this novel is ambitious and often compellinga book that works with important ideas about the way we're reshaping our lives in the Internet age, while being reshaped ourselves, spiritually, sexually.The Washington Post

Helen Schulman

This is bleak stuff, with flashes of humor that land like sparks on dry grass, and also pretty fascinating. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Banks may be the most compassionate fiction writer working today, and the Kid is only his most recent lens into the souls of seemingly decent men who do terribly indecent things out of ignorance, thirst and desperation in a deeply uncaring world. Balancing impressively on a moral tightrope, Banks never absolves the Kid of his actions even as he sympathizes with him.The New York Times Book Review

Miami Herald

“Banks is a master of peeling back the veneer to show us for the desperate creatures we are, no more so than in his fearless Lost Memory of Skin…[Banks] writes here with a combination of compassion and outrage… a compelling read and an indictment of our age.”

Time Out New York

“[It] is a pleasure to see [Banks’] gift turned to big, semisurreal characters. The grand, rambling examination of guilt and blame takes place against a ravishingly bleak backdrop, lyrically described, while each revelation of character is like a quiet explosion.”

Associated Press Staff

“Lost Memory of Skin should be required reading for anyone interested in fixing the country’s broken criminal justice system…Banks, in his latest novel, takes an unflinching look at people at their worst and manages to turn it into art.”

Wall Street Journal

“His boldest imaginative leap yet into the invisible margins of society… Lost Memory of Skin is a haunting book.”

Boston Globe

“Russell Banks really does know how to pull his readers into a dark, dark world only to deliver us into the light.”

USA Today

“Banks reveals the two [characters] with tenderness and trenchant wit, in a story that, not surprisingly, plumbs the depth of human despair and resilience. If that prowess is predictable, Skin is bound to leave you shaken and strangely reassured.”

New York Times Book Review

“Banks may be the most compassionate fiction writer working today… Lost Memory of Skin is proof that Banks remains our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American Male.”

Pittsburg Post-Gazette

“Mr. Banks knows plot, and incorporates intriguing complications to keep the novel building power all the way to the end.”

“Banks’s enormous gamble in both plot and character pays off handsomely…By the end, Kafka is rubbing elbows with Robert Ludlum, and Banks has mounted a thrilling defense of the novel’s place in contemporary culture.”

Chicago Tribune

“A ompelling story... one of those rare, strange, category-defying fictions that grabs hold of you... It’s hard to shake it off. And even when you do, it leaves a mark.”

Booklist

"Banks is in top form in his seventeenth work of fiction, a cyclonic novel of arresting observations, muscular beauty, and disquieting concerns… a commanding, intrepidly inquisitive, magnificently compassionate, and darkly funny novel of private and societal illusions, maladies, and truths."

Booklist (starred review)

“Banks is in top form in his seventeenth work of fiction, a cyclonic novel of arresting observations, muscular beauty, and disquieting concerns… a commanding, intrepidly inquisitive, magnificently compassionate, and darkly funny novel of private and societal illusions, maladies, and truths.”

Cornel West

“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.”

Michael Ondaatje

“Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time... I trust his portraits of America more than any other—the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it.”

What People are Saying About This

Michael Ondaatje

“Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time... I trust his portraits of America more than any other—the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it.”

Cornel West

“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.”

Meet the Author

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

&lsquo;Lost Memory&rsquo; Is a Social Commentary on Sex Offenders and Homelessness
Reading about homeless people is tough. Reading about sex offenders is even tougher. Reading about homeless, sex offenders can be downright difficult, which is what The Lost Memory of Skin by award-winning Russell Banks is all about. What&rsquo;s interesting is that Banks manages to write about this difficult combination without making the reader squirm too much. Rather than being about sex offenses, it&rsquo;s about people who live on the fringes of society and, in this case, they just happen to be in the national registry.
Set in the Florida panhandle, the book follows two main characters, The Kid and The Professor. The Kid is 21 and a convicted sex offender living under an overpass with other convicted offenders. It&rsquo;s one of two places in town that is the mandatory distance away from a school or public park and the group of men form, if not a friendship, then a cooperation of sorts based on their mutual exclusion from society. Life is fairly predictable until The Professor shows up wanting to interview The Kid about his day-to-day life. The Professor has a keen interest in the link between sex crimes and homelessness and The Kid spends a lot of time wondering what The Professor&rsquo;s end game is.
There were times when I was reading this book that I wasn&rsquo;t sure whether I was enjoying it or not. It&rsquo;s hard for me to read a book where I feel empathy for a character that I should probably hate. It was even harder because I had no idea what The Kid had done until much later in the book, so I had a lot of anxiety about what was to come. But when it was all said and done, the fact that I had an emotional reaction (good or bad) is an indication that it was worth the read.
Now that I&rsquo;ve had some time to look back and reflect, I have to admit that Banks&lsquo; way of writing is rather brilliant. If someone had told me that the book was made up of characters with generic names I would have thought it was a cop-out and a way to avoid full character development. But Banks actually manages to develop the characters even more in-depth because of their generic identities. It allows the reader to focus on the issues that the characters face more fully than if they had actual names. Because ultimately, this isn&rsquo;t a book about characters, it&rsquo;s a social commentary. It&rsquo;s about how one mistake can ruin someone&rsquo;s life. It&rsquo;s about how being cast out from society with nowhere to go results in a snowball effect. It&rsquo;s about how being required to live a certain distance away from a school or a park can be pretty problematic when there isn&rsquo;t any housing that meets the qualifications. It&rsquo;s about how a community more or less forces homelessness and then tries to address its homelessness problem.
So if you&rsquo;re looking for a happy-go-lucky story, this is definitely not the book for you. But if you&rsquo;re even slightly interested in reading The Lost Memory of Skin, then I highly recommend it. Along with all of the social commentary, there are some pretty great plot twists. Plus, it has an ending not unlike The Life of Pi in that it will leave you questioning everything. It can be slow-going and I didn&rsquo;t love it while I was reading it, but looking back I find that I enjoyed it much more than I had originally thought.

GinaLeeSlusher-BookLover

More than 1 year ago

Great story - dark and thought-provoking. At times it was very slow. I came to care about a character who, in real life, would never get a chance. The author did a great job of setting up the characters' personalities, investing me in each one.

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The author has no fear of writing about subjects that affect our &quot;civilized&quot; society. I enjoy reading about socioeconomic issues, so this book intrerested me. I enjoyed the way he wrote from each perspective: the kid and the professor. The plot twists were intriguing. This book sent me to the library for Russelll Bank's short stories, another good read.

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Could not believe this was the same author that wrote the magnificent "Cloudsplitter".